Past Cases

Case Status: Victory. Settled on Favorable Terms

Mattson v. Guyette, et al.

March 20th 2023

Daniel Mattson worked as a performer and adjunct professor at the Western Michigan University School of Music for more than twenty years. In 2017, Mattson wrote an autobiographical book describing his return to Catholicism after having spent most of his adulthood in a homosexual lifestyle. In 2021, an activist colleague at the university discovered Mattson’s […]

Case Status: Voluntarily dismissed

Mason Cathedral v. City of Boston

September 18th 2000

The Center for Individual Rights represented Mason Cathedral Church of God in Christ in a lawsuit claiming that the City of Boston violated the church's First Amendment rights when it removed federally funded counselors from the church's annual summer day camp, the “Keys of Life” program, in 1999 because of voluntary prayer...

Case Status: Victory

Columbia Union College v. Oliver

June 14th 1996

CUC, a small four-year college with about 600 students, had been denied a public grant by the state of Maryland because its Seventh-day Adventist composition made it "pervasively sectarian." Or, in plain English, CUC was too religious for the tastes of state bureaucrats...

Case Status: Victory

Rosenberger v. University of Virginia

June 29th 1995

In 1995, CIR fought and won a case before the Supreme Court that affirmed that government cannot exclude faith-based student organizations from programs because of their religious viewpoint...